After daylong drama about quarantining people returning from Italy, the authorities on Friday night allowed 142 of them to go home and asked them to be in self isolation.
However, 59 other Italy-returnees who arrived at Dhaka airport in the Saturday evening were sent to a makeshift quarantine centre in Gazipur’s Pubail.
According to government statistics, over 1200 expatriates have so far been asked to be in home quarantine, but many of them are reportedly not following the directive.
Although the government is repeatedly requesting people who are returning home from abroad to be in home quarantine for 14 days to prevent spread of novel coronavirus, many of them are seen walking freely in their localities.
We do not expect anything from the government to be assured as such because there are so many people around them who are too incompetent that they are accustomed to lies to misguide the government and come to think that lies always succeed.
We say do not play politics with the lives of the people threatened by a world-wide pandemic disease that has already taken more than five thousand lives. And the disease is highly contagious. Yet it has no medicine for cure.
By protecting oneself only one can help himself. There is need for the government to be properly equipped and get international help. For sure, the government has very poor stock of ventilators.
We shall ask the health officials to behave responsibly in these days of human crisis. Let others in the government remain complacent about unpreparedness.
There was an incident of anger and fury among a section of the returned people who were taken to Hajj Camp in Dhaka as they found the place unclean and uncared for.
Police and Ansars had to be called in to bring the situation under control. However, they are sent homes to be in self-quarantine.
The two incidents of mishandling with incoming passengers from badly infected countries could not be offered proper quarantine facilities. The few others were sent to a makeshift quarantine facility in Gazipur.
In this kind of unpreparedness, it is just difficult to believe that huge number of our people will not die helplessly without any care.
It was terribly wrong to send 142 people home came from Italy — the most severely spread coronavirus country — for self-confinement knowing fully well that most of them do not know what it is required to be in self-quarantine.
In developed and more educated countries also incoming people from abroad, even if their own people returned from other countries, require to stay in official confinement for 14 days.
Such irresponsible advice of self-quarantine for incoming passengers who have received no earlier training and where there is no assurance that they will be kept under watch of trained health officials, will only help the spread of the deadly disease.
